Damage for the children

WorldNetDaily contributor Linda Bowles is a
nationally syndicated columnist. She and her husband, Warren, have one
daughter, Michelle, and live on a ranch situated on the western slope of
the California Sierras.

“We must do it for the children” is an emotional argument widely used
by politicians to justify whatever it is they are advocating. It is rare
when a recommendation for spending money, raising taxes, or expanding
government is not accompanied by the exhortation that we have no choice
if we really care about our children.

Bill Clinton has spoken out for school uniforms, balanced budgets,
curfews, school lunches, vaccinations, abortion clinics, trade with
China, and trigger locks on guns — all for “the sake of our children.”
To be fair, I am not aware that he said he dropped bombs on an aspirin
factory in Sudan to save American children, but I am convinced he would
have, if his speechwriters could have manufactured a context for such
remarks that was not overwhelmingly outrageous.

Algore learned from the master the fine art of using the love of
children to manipulate public opinion. It is for the stated sake of the
children that Gore has proposed an expenditure of $40 billion on
day-care programs. Recently, he spent a full week visiting kindergartens
and rolling around on the floor playing with the tots, to give every
unwed mother in America the idea that he would be a great father to her
children. And in a speech to the Michigan Education Association, he was
impelled by his interest in children to propose, “Let’s give every
teacher a $5,000 raise. Let’s give master teachers a $10,000 raise.”

One would think that with government’s splendid intentions and
generous resources, America’s children would be healthier, happier and
better-educated than anywhere else on the planet. But reality tells us
another story, one of unintended consequences and good intentions gone
astray.

Anyone who reads the paper and watches television would have no
trouble believing that behavioral problems among children and teenagers
are increasing in number and intensity. Anyone who has lived long enough
to compare this generation of children with past generations knows that
something is terribly wrong.

These informal and “anecdotal” conclusions are backed up by extensive
research and studies. For example, a new “finding,” based on a carefully
controlled study of 21,065 patients age 4 to 15, reveals that the number
of children with emotional and behavioral problems dramatically
increased over the past 20 years. This increase in juvenile problems was
attributed, for the most part, to an increase in poor and single-parent
families.

Cornell University Professor Urie Bronfenbrenner, a renowned
developmental psychologist, summarized the cumulative evidence in
studies and research bearing on the behavior of children raised in homes
without their biological father. Among afflictions more prevalent among
these children, Dr. Bronfenbrenner cited “hyperactivity and withdrawal;
impaired academic achievement; smoking, drinking, early and frequent
sexual experience; drugs, suicide, vandalism, violence and criminal
acts.”

It is fair to ask what role our government has played in all of this.
What first comes to mind is the infamous welfare program, Aid to
Families with Dependent Children, which effectively destroyed countless
poor families, particularly black families. It did this by paying women
to have children out of wedlock, and providing them with income, medical
care, housing and food stamps under the solitary condition that they not
work or marry anyone who does.

The moral and mental abuse of children by government schools is
legendary. It is eminently reasonable to ask this question: Since the
children of the Gores and the Clintons were educated in private schools,
protected from the afflictions of a government school education, why do
they do everything in their power to keep children, mostly from poor and
single-parent families, trapped and segregated in inner-city, government
schools where they are misused by incompetent educators and exposed to
gangs, guns, drugs and morally corrosive peer pressures?

The government is twice a villain: first, by making the young mother
a ward of the state, and second, by holding her children captive in
mind-damaging, life-ruining, crime-breeding ghetto schools. These kids
don’t need Algore photo ops in day-care centers; they need fathers and
mothers living together in a stable and loving family.

In his book, “The American Sex Revolution,” Harvard sociologist
Pitirim Sorokin reviewed the history of societies through the ages, and
found that none survived after they ceased honoring and upholding the
institution of marriage between a man and a woman.

Decades of liberal assaults on traditional values and institutions
are bearing fruit. It appears that we will ignore the wisdom of the
centuries and find out the hard way whether our society can survive a
perverted redefinition of marriage and the disintegration of the basic
family.